At Love's Cost

The blood rushed to Ida's face for a moment, then faded, and she

slipped the note into the pocket of her habit and laughed. For it

sounded too ridiculous, too incredible to cause her even a shadow of

annoyance. She gave one or two orders to Jason, then went into the

hall, took the note from her pocket and looked at the address lovingly,

lingeringly: for instinctively she knew whose hand had written it. It

was the first letter she had received from him; what would it say to

her? No doubt it was to tell her why he had not been able to meet her

that morning, to ask her to meet him later in the day. With a blush of

maidenly shame she lifted the envelope to her lips and kissed each

written word.

Then she opened it, slowly, as lingeringly as she had looked at it,

spinning out the pleasure, the delight which lay before her in the

perusal of her first love-letter. With her foot upon the old-fashioned

fender, her head drooping as if there was someone present to see her

blushes, she read the letter; and it is not too much to say that at

first she failed utterly to grasp its meaning. With knit brows and

quaking heart, she read it again and again, until its significance was,

so to speak, forced upon her; then the letter dropped from her hand,

her arms fell limply to her sides, and she looked straight before her

in a dazed, benumbed fashion, every word burning itself upon her brain

and searing her heart.

The blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, like a bolt from the

blue, smiting the happiness of her young life as a sapling is smitten

by summer lightning, that for the moment she felt no pain, nothing but

the benumbing of all her faculties; so that she did not see the

portrait of the dead and gone Heron upon which her eyes rested, did not

hear her father's voice calling to her from the library, was conscious

of nothing but those terrible words which were dinning through her

brain like the booming of a great bell. Presently she uttered a low cry

and clasped her head with her hand, as if to shut out the sound of the

words that tortured her.

It could not be true--it could not be true! Stafford had not written

it. It was some cruel jest, a very cruel jest, perpetrated by someone

who hated them both, and who wantonly inflicted pain. Yes; that was it!

That could be the only explanation. Someone had written in his name; it

was a forgery; she would meet Stafford presently, and they would laugh

at it together. He would be very angry, would want to punish the person

who had done it; but he and she would laugh together, and he would take

her in his arms and kiss her in one of the many ways in which he had

made a kiss an ecstasy of delight, and they would laugh together as he

whispered that nothing should ever separate them.